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Lenny Bruce
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Lenny Bruce was born Leonard Alfred Schneider on October 13, 1925, in Mineola, Long Island, New York. His British-born father, Myron, was a shoe clerk, his mother, Sadie, was a dancer. Lenny's parents were divorced when he was a child. To support herself and her son, Sadie Schneider persued a career in show business and sent Lenny to live with various aunts, uncles and grandparents. Dropping out of high school, Lenny enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942, which he almost disliked. He got himself discharged after convincing a team of Navy psychologists that he was experimenting with homosexual urges.
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Lenny Bruce is the ultimate politically incorrect comedian whose career began and ended in North Beach. The comedian, whose profanity-laced, politically confrontational monologues made him the object of public derision and police harassment, revolutionized stand-up comedy in the U.S. in the 1960s. Among his many legal battles, Bruce was convicted of obscenity for a November, 1964 performance in Greenwich Village. New York Governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon on December 23, 2003. Also among the events in Bruce's tumultuous life is a 1965 fall from a second story window of the Swiss American Hotel, 534 Broadway.
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An American counter-culture icon from the 1960s, Lenny Bruce's obscenity-laced social satire paved the way for modern stand-up comedy. Bruce served in the navy during World War II (1942-45) and began performing stand-up comedy in 1946. As he gained popularity in New York night clubs, his brand of comedy shifted from impersonations to free-wheeling monologues satirizing religion and politics. He released several comedy albums and appeared occasionally on TV, especially as a guest of Steve Allen and Hugh Hefner. In 1961 he was arrested after a performance in San Francisco and charged with obscenity. Bruce was acquitted, but for the next few years he was frequently in trouble with the law for using raw language on stage -- a no-no back then.
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Lenny Bruce -- whose 1964 New York obscenity conviction Gov. George Pataki finally vacated two weeks ago -- satisfied at least two definitions of genius. First, a genius is somebody who breaks all the rules only after learning them thoroughly. This was certainly true of Bruce, who spent years as a stand-up tummler, honing his comic timing on Borscht Belt impressions so feeble that timing was pretty much all he had. By the time he bombed out of the Catskills circuit and started playing strip joints, he was polishing his offhand, improvisational delivery to a high shine. Bruce could get laughs with nothing. He did it on rhythm, on emphasis, on technique alone.
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Like Lenny Bruce and Redd Foxx in the 60's, Richard Pryor and George Carlin in the 70's, and Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy in the 80's, the stand-up genre is being redefined. But, instead of shifting the complexity of the subject matter or swaying the structure to fit the times, the producers reestablished the art-form by changing the person at the center, the comedian.
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Lenny Bruce is considered the God Father of 'Blue' Comedians. Without him there would be no Andrew Dice Clay. In this bit he talks about one of him many encounters with the judicial system.
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Lenny Bruce